The Slave Ship (18 page)

Equiano’s Middle Passage proved to be a pageant of cruelty, degradation, and death.
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It began, crucially, with all of the enslaved locked belowdecks “so that we could not see how they managed the vessel.” Many of the things he complained about while the vessel was anchored on the coast suddenly worsened. Now that everyone was confined together belowdecks, the apartments were “so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself.” The enslaved were spooned together in close quarters, each with about as much room as a corpse in a coffin. The “galling of the chains” rubbed raw the soft flesh of wrists, ankles, and necks. The enslaved suffered extreme heat and poor ventilation, “copious perspirations,” and seasickness. The stench, which was already “loathsome,” became “absolutely pestilential” as the sweat, the vomit, the blood, and the “necessary tubs” full of excrement “almost suffocated us.” The shrieks of the terrified mingled in cacophony with the groans of the dying.
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Kept belowdecks, probably because of bad weather, for days at a time, Equiano watched as his shipmates expired, “thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.” The ship was filling up with the troubled spirits of the deceased, whom the living could neither bury properly nor provide with offerings. Conditions had “carried off many,” most of them probably by the “bloody flux,” or dysentery. The Bight of Biafra had one of the highest mortality rates of any slaving area, and the eight months it took the
Ogden
to gather its enslaved “cargo” only made matters worse. Equiano himself soon grew sick and expected to die. Indeed his death wish returned as he hoped “to put an end to my miseries.” Of the dead thrown over-board, he mused, “Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself. I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs.” Equiano considered those who had committed suicide by jumping overboard to be still alive, happy and free, and apparently still in touch with people on the ship.
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Against the horror and the death wish stood stubborn, resistant life. Equiano continued to communicate with his fellow enslaved for the sake of survival. This he owed in part to enslaved women, who may or may not have been Igbo, and who washed him and showed maternal care for him. Because he was a child, he went unfettered, and because he was sickly, he was kept “almost continually on deck,” where he witnessed an increasingly fierce dialectic of discipline and resistance. The crew grew more cruel as the enslaved resolved to use whatever means available to them to fight back. Equiano saw several of his hungry countrymen take some fish to eat and then get flogged viciously for it. Not long after, on a day “when we had a smooth sea, and moderate wind,” he witnessed at close range three captives break from the crew, jump over the side of the ship, elude the nettings, and splash into the water below. The crew snapped into action, putting everyone belowdecks to prevent the attempted suicide from escalating (as Equiano was convinced it would have done), then lowered the boat to recover those who had gone overboard. There “was such a noise and confusion amongst the people of the ship as I never heard before.” Despite the crew’s efforts, two of the rebels successfully completed their self-destruction by drowning. The third was recaptured, brought back on deck, and whipped ferociously for “attempting to prefer death to slavery.” Equiano thus noted a culture of resistance forming among the enslaved.

One part of Equiano’s own strategy of resistance was to learn all he could from the sailors about how the ship worked. This would, in the long run, prove to be his own path to liberation, since he would work as a sailor, collect his wages, and buy his freedom at age twenty-four. He described himself as one of the people on board who was “most active,” which in eighteenth-century maritime parlance meant most vigorous in doing the work of the ship. As he watched the sailors toil, he grew fascinated and at the same time mystified by their use of the quadrant: “I had often with astonishment seen the mariners make observations with it, and I could not think what it meant.” The sailors noted the bright boy’s curiosity, and one of them decided one day to gratify it. He let Equiano peer through the lens. “This heightened my wonder; and I was now more persuaded than ever that I was in another world, and that every thing about me was magic.” It
was
another world, a seafaring society unto itself, and it had a magic that could be learned. Equiano had made a beginning.
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Yet another world soon appeared on the horizon. Upon sighting land, the crew “gave a great shout” and made “many signs of joy.” But Equiano and the rest of the captives did not share in the excitement. They did not know what to think. Before them lay Barbados, epicenter of the historic sugar revolution, crown jewel of the British colonial system, and one of the most fully realized—and therefore most brutal—slave societies to be found anywhere in the world. The plantations of the small island would be the destination of most of the captives aboard the ship.
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As the snow came to anchor in the busy harbor of Bridgetown, nestling among a forest of ship masts, a new set of fears gripped Equiano and his fellows of the lower deck. In the darkness of night, strange new people came aboard, and all the enslaved were herded up to the main deck for inspection. Merchants and planters, prospective buyers of the enslaved, began immediately to examine Equiano and his shipmates carefully. “They also made us jump,” Equiano recalled, “and pointed to the land, signifying we were to go there.” They organized the captives into “separate parcels” for sale.

All the while Equiano and apparently others “thought by this we should be eaten by these ugly men, as they appeared to us.” Soon everyone was put back belowdecks, but new horror had taken root, as Equiano explained: “there was much dread and trembling among us, and nothing but bitter cries to be heard all the night from these apprehensions.” How long the cries went on is not clear, but eventually the white visitors responded by summoning “some old slaves from the land to pacify us.” These veterans of Barbados plantation society “told us we were not to be eaten, but to work, and were soon to go on land, where we should see many of our country people.” The tactic seemed to work: “This report eased us much; and sure enough, soon after we were landed, there came to us Africans of all languages.”

Presently Equiano and the others were taken ashore, to the “merchant’s yard,” as he called it, a place where “we were all pent up together like so many sheep in a fold, without regard to sex or age,” which would have seemed odd after experiencing the gender and age separations of the ship. Despite the harrowing uncertainty of the new situation, the sights of Bridgetown filled Equiano with fresh wonder. He noticed that the houses were built high, with stories, unlike any he had known in Africa. “I was still more astonished,” he noted, “on seeing people on horseback. I did not know what this could mean; and indeed I thought these people were full of nothing but magical arts.”
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Other shipmates, however, were not surprised. Some “fellow prisoners” from a distant part of Africa, no doubt the northern savanna, observed that the horses “were the same kind they had in their country.” This was confirmed by others, who added that their own horses were “larger than those I then saw.”
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A few days later came the sale, by “scramble.” The merchants arrayed the human commodities in the yard, then sounded a signal, the beating of a drum, whereupon buyers frantically rushed in to pick those they wanted to purchase. The “noise and clamour” of the moment terrified the Africans and made them think that the greedy buyers would be the agents of their doom. Some still feared cannibalism. The fear was justified, as most of those purchased would indeed be eaten alive—by the deadly work of making sugar in Barbados.

A third separation was now at hand, which illuminates the connections made on the ship while anchored on the coast of Africa and during its Middle Passage. Equiano noted that at this moment, without scruple, “relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again.” He recalled the sad fate of several brothers who had been confined together in the men’s apartment of his vessel, who were now sold in separate lots to different masters. He wrote that “it was very moving on this occasion to see and hear their cries at parting.” Husbands were separated from wives, parents from children, brothers from sisters.

Yet it was not only blood kin who shrieked and grieved at the prospect of separation. It was “dearest friends and relations,” people who had already been separated once from their kindred, who had now mingled “their sufferings and sorrows” aboard the ship. Some of these people had been together on the ship for as long as eight months
before
the Middle Passage. They had cheered each other amid the “gloom of slavery.” They had what Equiano called “the small comfort of being together,” crying together, resisting together, trying to survive together. The new community that had been formed aboard the ship was being ripped asunder as the captives would all be forced to go “different ways.” Equiano noted with deep sadness that “every tender feeling” that had developed aboard the ship would now be sacrificed to avarice, luxury, and the “lust of gain.”
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For Equiano and several of his shipmates, the Middle Passage did not end in Barbados. These few “were not saleable amongst the rest, from very much fretting.” The traumatic passage had apparently made them unhealthy—emaciated, diseased, melancholy, or all of these. The buyers must have doubted their survival and declined to purchase them. They became “refuse slaves.” They stayed on the island for a few days and were then carried to a smaller vessel, a sloop, perhaps the
Nancy,
Richard Wallis master, bound for the York River in Virginia. The second passage was easier than the first. Compared to the slave ship, the number of the enslaved on board now was much smaller, the atmosphere was less tense and violent, and the food was better, as the captain wanted to fatten them up for sale farther north. Equiano wrote, “On the passage we were better treated than when we were coming from Africa, and we had plenty of rice and fat pork.” But all was not well, as Equiano felt the loss of his shipmates who were sold in Barbados: “I now totally lost the small remains of comfort I had enjoyed in conversing with my countrymen; the women too, who used to wash and take care of me, were all gone different ways, and I never saw one of them afterwards.” Had he seen one or more of them, the bond of the shipboard experience would have been activated and renewed.
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The boy apparently formed new bonds with his fellow Africans aboard the sloop, even though they did not speak his language. But then these bonds, too, were shattered upon landing in Virginia, as “at last all my companions were distributed different ways, and only myself was left.” Disconnected yet again, and envying even those who were sold in lots, he explained, “I was now exceedingly miserable, and thought myself worse off than any of the rest of my companions; for they could talk to each other, but I had no person to speak to that I could understand.” In this situation his death wish returned: “I was constantly grieving and pining, and wishing for death, rather than anything else.”

Equiano continued in his lonely, forlorn state until a former naval officer and now merchant ship captain, Michael Henry Pascal, bought the boy as a gift for someone in England. Equiano was taken aboard the
Industrious Bee,
“a fine large ship, loaded with tobacco, &c. and just ready to sail.” The Middle Passage must have seemed like endless passage, but at least now he was on a deep-sea ship whose purpose was not to transport slaves. The conditions of life improved accordingly: “I had sails to lie on, and plenty of good victuals to eat; and every body on board,” at least at first, “used me very kindly, quite contrary to what I had seen of any white people before.” Maybe they were not bad spirits after all, and in any case the all-encompassing, terror-filled category “white people” began slowly to change: “I therefore began to think that they were not all of the same disposition.” He also began to speak English, talked with members of the crew, and continued to learn the workings of a ship.

Perhaps the most important thing to happen to Equiano on this voyage was his discovery of a new shipmate, a boy of about fifteen named Richard Baker. Son of an American slaveholder (and indeed the owner of slaves himself ), well educated, and possessed of a “most amiable temper” and a “mind superior to prejudice,” Baker befriended the African boy, who explained, “he shewed me a great deal of partiality and attention, and in return I grew extremely fond of him.” The two became inseparable, Baker translating for Equiano and teaching him many useful things.

As a privileged passenger on the voyage, Baker ate at the captain’s table, and as the voyage dragged on and provisions grew scarce, Captain Pascal cruelly joked at mealtime that they might have to kill Equiano and eat him. At other times he would say the same thing to Equiano himself but then add that “black people were not good to eat,” so they might have to kill Baker first “and afterwards me.” Pascal also asked Equiano if his own people in Africa were cannibals, to which the panicked boy replied no.

These exchanges reignited the terror of the slaving voyage in Equiano, especially after the captain put everyone on board to short allowance, a rationing of food. “Towards the last,” remembered Equiano, “we had only one pound and a half of bread per week, and about the same quantity of meat, and one quart of water a day.” They caught fish to supplement their victuals, but food remained scarce. The joking grew more ominous: “I thought them in earnest, and was depressed beyond measure, expecting every moment to be my last.” He was also alarmed for his friend and shipmate Baker. Whenever Baker was called by captain or mate, Equiano “would peep and watch to see if they were going to kill him.”